


dear sister

by frostmantle



Category: Exalted (Roleplaying Game)
Genre: 3e is the reset switch, Bad end, Gen, Origin Story, for someone anyway, sidereal exaltation, some headcanons but not that much, they're both teenagers but there you've been warned, very brief sexual content hence the mature tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-20
Updated: 2018-12-20
Packaged: 2019-09-23 04:23:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17073407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frostmantle/pseuds/frostmantle
Summary: You cannot remember a time when the two of you were not one, but now you must go alone. (Origin story, 3E)





	dear sister

**Author's Note:**

> NOTES: This is me playing around in a drabble format trying to get myself back into writing regularly. I originally created this character for a forum writing project about ten years ago, but I ended up liking her too much to leave as a one-off and frankly she's a more compelling character than a lot of the other Exalted OCs I made in that time period.
> 
> Enough yammering from me though, have a story.

 

\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

The two of you began as one.

You were conceived together and born together: your sister first, the eldest by a scant brace of moments, still half-wrapped in her own caul as she slides screaming into the world. You are next, smaller and a bit less robust, laid in the crook of your mother's arm alongside.

The wet nurse is summoned to take you away but she does not do so before the cerulean strands between you are pulled taut by the workings of the world, reaching interconnected beyond this moment towards some unknown future.

 

==

You are two, almost three, when you speak for the first time, relieving the increasing worries of your parents. Dynastic children must be perfect and any hindrance to that perfection reflects poorly upon their houses. Your sister was first to say her precious words, as she is first in all things, but you had held your silence long past the point when other children had started, clumsily, to ape the language with private tutors.

When you do open your mouth at last it is no toddler's prattle. You speak in perfectly articulated, fully constructed High Realm sentences and all the secret concerns they had melt away, like crocus blooms unfurling in spring's first warmth, to be replaced with awed surprise.

This milestone is, though no one realizes it, a harbinger of your adult self: you will never do anything until you are certain all will be done as you desire it.

 

==

You are five when your father's commission for the Scarlet Empress puts the four of you on a palatial ship bound for Thorns. It is beautiful, you overhear your grandmother telling him, sadness in her voice. Rose-covered trellises, beautiful young men and women, Shogunate warriors with a rich culture. They love the Dynasty there, perhaps it's the Threshold but it's perfectly safe.

Your sister clasps your hand in hers, seeking comfort, and you squeeze it as the ship begins its journey from the harbor to cross the sea.

You catch a glimpse of your grandmother's expression one last time before she becomes just another face in the crowd. It is fear, and sadness, and some other emotion you are too young to understand.

 

==

You are nine when one of your older playmates answers the call of the Dragons.

The Autocrat's palace gardens are large and opulent enough to rival many of the greatest Houses, and you and your sister have spent the last three years mapping every inch of it. Sometimes you were alone, but more often than not you have been accompanied by other children from the Realm, sons and daughters of diplomats and warriors and scholars.

He is a shy lad, perhaps four years older than you, bullied by some of the bigger boys in the compound, but this time must have been the last straw. You still remember staring at him in astonishment as lightning strikes and thunder rolls around him, a furious cyclone of emotion and Essence, rose petals showering everything. The throng of children is broken apart by his tutor, rushing to gather him up with a triumphant smile on his face and a reverent whisper of _Young Master!_ before whisking him away. Chosen of the Immaculate Dragon of Air, Lady Mela, the first and greatest warrior of them all.

When the boy appears in the dining hall it is with a closed expression and a proud bearing, and the boys who tormented him are nowhere to be seen. It is quite a thing, you know, to be Chosen. But you cannot help but notice the lack of joy in his face as he leaves your table behind to join the adults.

Not all Endings are solutions even when they are desired outcomes.

 

==

You are thirteen when you see the full depths of your sister's depression. She creeps into your bed and cries and tells you she'll never Exalt, that she'll never be worth anything in the eyes of your parents. It is the first night of many.

On each night this happens you hold her and stroke her soft hair and twine your legs with hers and murmur soothing platitudes for comfort, the only person you have ever really loved, aching for her pain and for the sense of loss coursing in your own breast, a deep and slow current just beneath. You tell her of course she's worth something.

But you don't tell her she'll Exalt, because you know without knowing how you know that she, like you, will never know that moment. No flying rose petals and celebratory feasts, just a lifetime of doing the best you can, to make your house as proud as you can make it while knowing they'll always be just a touch disappointed.

The two of you are one, standing together outside the flow of your station.

It is the first time you feel true bitterness.

 

==

You are sixteen when you step, briefly, outside your two/oneness.

He is your tutor's only other pupil, a Dragon-Blooded boy from House Mnemon: shy and bookish like you, more interested in medical books than courtly dances. Curiosity and too much drink lead you back to his quarters, and to a moment that is at once frightening and exciting: the first time another person has seen you unclothed.

It is awkward, painful at first, not entirely unpleasant, but the two of you never speak of it again and never approach each other again. You have different lives and you, you realize to your own horrified relief several days later, were fortunate not to have found yourself with child, for neither of you had once considered the risk until your tryst had ended.

This is the one and only secret you have ever kept from your sister, and it will be years before you take another lover.

 

==

You are eighteen when your world Ends.

Something has gone horribly, unspeakably wrong. Thorns, your Thorns, your shining beautiful city of gardens and warrior-poets, is a smoking ruin crawling with the dead.

War ghosts and nameless horrors now prowl streets once laden with prayer tapestries while blood and bone fall from the bruised Underworld sky, pelting great holes in ancient shingles and painting the pristine beauty of whitewashed walls and rose trellises in crimson and black. The Mnemon boy who had learned history and strategy and medicine alongside you died on the battlefield, trying to aid your mother (her anima a majestic whirlwind of ice and fury before she was silenced by horrors even the Chosen of the Dragons cannot withstand alone). Your tutor was murdered and soulforged into a dagger for one of the Deathlord's favored generals, and your father went out the second week of the siege foraging for food and never returned, and the dining rooms and dancing rooms resplendent with feasts and flowers and the larger-than-life grandeur of the Exalted are empty and silent and now and now and now.

Now.

The two of you are one, locked in a spiral of sorrow and terror.

You have lost track of how long it has taken you to run, a sharp pain in your side reminding you at last of your mortality. You force yourself to pause, bracing your hands against your knees and nearly choking on the fouled air as you try not to cough.

You have ended up in the old catacombs in the palace district, a haphazard cluster of ancestral tombs and shrines to the Dragons (among others, a heresy that cannot have gone unnoticed by the monks), because there had been rumors afield that somewhere in the old sanctum of the city-father, the one before the Immaculates had relocated him to a temple in the palace, there was a path out of the city that even the Deathlord didn't know about.

Hurry up, your sister urges, plucking frantically at your sleeve. Hurry up. They'll find us if we don't keep moving.

Somewhere above you hear the shrieks of soulsteel and the heavy metallic ring of footsteps. Moving in the darkness. Seeking two mortal Dynastic twins.

Finding the last vestige of your strength, you nod and clasp your sister's hand once again, to venture into the unknown.

~*~

In precisely two days, four hours, and forty-eight seconds, you awaken alone in a bolt-hole somewhere in the darkness, your eyes full of stars and your mind a near-blank slate, with injuries grievous enough that they would have been mortal had your fated Exaltation not saved your life. Your sister is nowhere to be found but even as panic sets in you know you are too weak to cry out for her.

This Ending, you sense, is the one that changed everything, even if you have no memory of how it came to pass or where your sister might have vanished---but you know she is gone. The spark of divinity in you tells you, in a flat, factual way, that she isn't coming back.

You curl in on yourself despite the pain even that small movement brings you, and wrap your cloak tightly around your shoulders. In your next breath you inhale the faint scent of your sister's sachet, the last piece of her left to you. The two of you were one, but now you must go alone.

Alone, dimly haloed in liminal violet, you begin to weep.


End file.
